Questions tagged [engineering]
Engineering is the discipline, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.
33 questions
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Is this video a serious explanation of missile guidance algorithms?
This video, titled "The Missile Knows Where It Is", has become popular as an internet meme. It describes a technique for missile guidance, but it's so confusing that people have started ...
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Is yellow safer than white for center line road markings?
The Random Fact Generator website told me:
By 1955, forty-nine of the U.S. states agreed that state highways should have a white stripe down the middle between cars going in different directions. The ...
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Were nuclear sub engineers told that when alarms go off they should grab a bar, until they have examined their instrument panel?
The book Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J. Agans, which was first published in 2002, contains the following claim:
On ...
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Would covering 10% of hydro-power reservoirs with solar panels generate as much power as fossil-fuel plants worldwide?
This article in the journal Nature, claims that:
Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-...
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Can pressurized air directed on the skin cause an embolism?
At my workplace we are warned against using compressed air to blow dust of working clothes etc, except when a special nozzle is affixed to the to the hose, reducing the pressure of the released air.
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Is the sewage from the Burj Khalifa transported away by trucks?
There are several articles and videos on the net claiming that the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai is not connected to a wastewater treatment plant by a sewer system, but that instead the sewage is ...
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Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
This is quoted every now and then in film and television (e.g. The Truman Show), purportedly placing it among a rare class of single object that are ...
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Do bimetal jigsaw blades last twice as long as HSS blades and ten times longer than HCS blades?
Bosch makes this claim in their jigsaw blade documentation:
Bi-Metal (BiM): This highly flexible, tough combination
of HSS [High-Speed Steel] and HCS [High-Carbon Steel] results in a blade
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Does this video of collapsing warehouse shelves show a real incident?
This video seems to show a minor bump by a fork lift causing multiple rows of shelving to collapse, burying the fork lift and operator.
Is this a real incident, or a faked video? The video has been ...
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Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
On February 13 2019, NASA announced that Opportunity - a Mars rover launched in 2003 with an intended longevity of three months - was likely to be dead.
In the wake of this event, and the outpouring ...
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Will the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah be the 'longest bridge' in the world?
In any metric, this doesn't seem to qualify as the longest bridge in the world. I could be miscalculating, but a number of articles are using the title 'longest'. The articles below are highlights ...
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Can the Hyperloop infrastructure implode due to a single crack? [closed]
In the article Hyperloop: the doubts persist, it is claimed that the hyperloop could implode due to a crack in the tunnel wall. The argument is supported by the claim that air would rush in at the ...
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Do electric cars emit half the CO2 as diesel from a life-cycle perspective?
From The Guardian:
"On average, electric vehicles will emit half the CO2 emissions of a diesel car by 2030, including the manufacturing emissions," said Yoann Le Petit, a spokesman for the T&E ...
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Would it have been possible for the ancients to have built a Tower of Babel? [closed]
As recorded in Genesis 11:1-9, the ancients allegedly built a tower to the skies in a valley in Babylon (near present-day Baghdad), and God scattered them across the Earth as a punishment.
As ...
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Does talking to a rubber duck improve programmer performance when debugging?
In software engineering (especially XP) there is a commonly held belief that talking to a rubber duck will improve performance when debugging problematic code.
This technique is referenced in multiple ...